Three Ways to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy

The term “digital marketing” has been a part of recurrent conversations in marketing circles for years now, and is becoming synonymous with marketing in general as time goes on. That’s because the very definition of digital marketing, or in other words the sophisticated use of digital channels to connect with consumers, details a practice essential to modern marketing success. Digital touch points such as tablets, smartphones and wearable devices are becoming more ubiquitous around the world.

Keeping up with today’s digital marketing challenges can be demanding too. With all of the information today’s marketers are expected to process, evaluate and consider before moving their campaigns forward, it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture from time to time.

Recently, I was speaking to a customer who touched on this very point by taking a step back from campaign management practices to voice concerns over his company’s overall digital marketing strategy. This customer was familiar with the 8 different products Adobe Marketing Cloud offered, but was worried his organization didn’t have a firm grasp of the broader digital marketing scene.

My last blog post focused on establishing effective campaign management practices for your organization. But what if your company is more concerned with establishing a general digital marketing strategy? Has your marketing department determined what their goals are as marketers, or are they just following the lead of their industry peers?

Campaign management practices, like efficient content management, mobile optimization and cross-channel strategies are all important ways to market to today’s technologically advanced consumer base. But concentrating on the most important part of the customer journey, the customer experience, can help your organization improve its total digital marketing strategy. Let’s go over three things digital marketers can do to enhance the customer experience throughout the digital marketing process.

1. Improve customer acquisition. Before your customers ever land on your digital properties, you are going to have to find creative ways to fill them in on who you are and what you are doing as an enterprise. This is where the acquisition game comes into play, and it is a crucial step for marketers looking to gain traffic to their websites, e-commerce stores and blogs. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Vine are all effective ways to draw a new crowd to your website, and other methods such as search and display may also help you optimize your media plan. That’s why it is crucial for your company to identify what your acquisition goals are before you begin the acquisition portion of your digital marketing campaign.
2. Intensify your engagement strategy. According to the Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing from Econsultancy, the most commonly cited business objectives among survey respondents were improving customer engagement and building the brand through positive experiences. Marketers are aware of how important it is to engage customers while enhancing their brands, but many of them are not sure where to start. This is where utilizing your data efficiently can help your company create personalized experiences for the customers visiting your website. Web analytics solutions can help enterprises collect, organize, and analyze data to gain a better understanding of what exactly website visitors are looking for. This valuable data can then be transformed into actionable information that companies can use to pinpoint their customers’ wants and needs, creating a consumer/brand engagement dynamic that continues to improve as more data is collected–because the more you know about your customers, the more likely they are to have positive experiences with your brand.
3. Increase retention rates. Acquiring new customers is one thing, but retaining the customers you already have poses unique challenges for today’s marketers. From the moment you realize your customers are failing to react to your messaging, you need to take a proactive approach to determine where the problem exists. Has your customer left your brand for one of your competitors? Is your customer turned off by bland communications that are no longer personalized and engaging? Or are you missing the point altogether? Using scoring rules alongside the technology and data you already have can help your marketing department determine where your retention efforts should be focused. This will help your organization concentrate on the customers that are more likely to convert based on their positions in the buying cycle, which will improve your company’s digital-marketing efficiency.

Today’s consumers demand excellent experiences from each and every brand they interact with. Delivering such experiences occasionally requires organizations to take a step back and reevaluate their overall digital marketing strategies. Ask yourself if you are doing everything you can to acquire new customers, retain loyal ones, and produce the most engaging, personalized experiences possible. If you believe you are maxing out your ability to enhance your digital marketing strategy, just remember: there’s always room for improvement.